Leyner steps into the twenty-first century with his best novel yet. A kaleidoscopic anti-narrative that retells the epic story of unemployed butcher Ike Karton's dealings with the gods as that story is destroyed before the reader's eyes. Leyner spins a modern mythology of the kind that Neil Gaiman could if he ran towards rather than away from contemporary culture within a story structure of the kind that David Foster Wallace could have created if he hadn't had both eyes on academia. Grab yourself a jerrycan of orange soda and start chanting...

...consists of three balding Soviet men wandering around an abandoned hydroelectric power plant for three hours.

What Stalker does in a way that only 2001 or Forbidden Planet or The Matrix approach in Western cinema is to lead you deep down the rabbit hole of the uncanny with an inexorable logic and a frog-boiling gradualness that will kick you in the gut only after you've reached the punchline. This is the cinematic equivalent of great literature. It is major. It will affect and inform you.

It's an amazing film but this isn't a very good presentation. The cover is a colour copy, the DVD graphics have been copied from another print, and the film itself looks like it's been ripped from a VHS tape. Hopefully the BFI will rescue this film at some point, but until then this version will have to do.